This is gonna sound crazy… but at some point I stopped trying to budget because my SO and I couldn’t find anything that worked for both of us. My wife wanted to do the envelope method, but it ended up where she would basically leave the envelopes in her purse and I was dependent on her for any purchase. We switched to YNAB for a little while, but my wife would never enter transactions consistently so I would always end up making one large adjustment at the end of every month.

Ultimately this is what we do now: all routine bills/savings/short and long obligations get paid or deposited first, and there is usual only around a potential $100 variation in those numbers each month. So that ends up being a magic number that we both know we need as a minimum. Outside of that, we basically use our joint credit card account for everything else. When it gets close to a certain number we both stop any unnecessary spending until the next billing cycle and then we pay it off entirely. So far we have maybe hit that number three or four times in the last two years? It gives us a high level view of our spending and we don’t get in the weeds about “can we get this” or stress about every dollar being correctly utilized. If we realize that we can’t afford something we either plan for it during the next billing cycle, or dip into savings if we need it urgently.

We don’t leave each other in the dark on any of this though. We both get a notification on every transaction we make, and we’re both very transparent on our purchases.

I’m not going to recommend you follow my method, but so far it works pretty well for us.